Work Of Young Scholars Research Articles

In Memory

In Memory Stephen R. Platt Jonathan Spence (1936–2021) On Christmas Day of 2021, our community lost Jonathan Spence, the founding editor of this journal and a historian of Late Imperial China whose books pulsed with life and emotion. His influence went well beyond his immediate field—he was one of the few historians of China to be elected president of the American Historical Association—and he was best known for character-centered histories built around individuals into whose lives readers from all walks of life could become lost and transported. They were historical works of unsurpassed literary power, where every word on the page seemed to matter. Many readers of this journal may point to one of his books as being the magnet that first drew them into the field of Chinese history. In the course of forty years at Yale, Jonathan taught more than sixty PhD students as well as multitudes of undergraduates who went on to China-related careers in academia and elsewhere. His Modern China survey was one of the most popular classes in the entire university—"Spence," the students called it—and several hundred would sign up whenever he taught it, filling the traditional lecture halls to overflowing and forcing the university to move the course to churches and other more capacious venues. Jonathan was an entrancing speaker with a rich British accent. He looked like Sean Connery, though his eyebrows were more expressive. To a student watching him up at the lectern, he seemed the Hollywood archetype of a tweedy history professor. He could be intimidating, but didn't mean to be. To the eye of a graduate student, he had distinctive accessories that seemed somehow to define him as a teacher—his soft leather briefcase, the thick pad of paper he kept by the side of his chair, the pencils (never pens) he used to write comments. And there were the glimpses of his playful, informal side as well, like the giant poster of major-league pitcher Greg Maddux that hung from his office wall. Or his much-adored and lavishly spoiled little Scottish terrier Maddux, named after said pitcher, whose grey beard matched Jonathan's almost perfectly. [End Page vi] The agon around Jonathan was always between presence and distance: his need, on the one hand, to escape into isolation to think and write, to immerse himself in his sources and his visions—what he called in one of his books "the aloneness that always comes over me when I write"—and set against that, his central role in the Yale history department, which required his constant presence and attention to others. If it seemed at times like he might have preferred to disappear permanently into the imaginative worlds of history and literature, his professional responsibilities—and of course his loving relationship with his wife, Annping Chin—kept him anchored in the here and now. As a graduate student I could never understand how he managed to read so much in the field, and serve on committees, and teach the hundreds of undergraduates who sought him out every year—a crowd of them would line the halls in the basement of Timothy Dwight College whenever he held office hours—and still get his own writing done. He was a regular presence on campus yet still found the time to write more prolifically than any historian I knew. One of the secrets to his productivity was a stunning ability to read. It seemed to take him no time at all to finish a book, an article, a paper—though he read more slowly when he was reviewing a book, he said, because you had to respect the years of labor that the scholar had put into it. His gift for voracious reading was paired with an ingrained (shall we say English, or old-fashioned) conscientiousness that made him a punctual responder, a principled correspondent, a keeper of deadlines. He set a model of professionalism for his graduate students in the promptness with which he wrote letters and read drafts, and how closely he kept up with (and complimented) the work of younger scholars from other institutions. Books were not on the syllabus or...

Memory Politics in the Former Yugoslavia

This article provides an overview of some of the most prevalent topics in post-Yugoslav memory politics as well as on some of the scholars working on these issues, focusing on the commemorative practices of the Second World War and the wars of the 1990s. Thirty years after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, the discourse of post-war memory politics continues to dominate nearly all of the successor states, even though two of them have seemingly left the past behind to join the European Union. While the wars of the 1990s created an entirely new memoryscape in the region, they also radically transformed the way in which each country commemorated the Second World War. Although the article examines in-depth the collective remembrance of sites of memory, such as Jasenovac, Bleiburg, and Knin, trends across the broader region are also addressed. The work of young scholars, as well as experienced researchers, who have introduced innovative approaches in memory studies in the former Yugoslavia, is highlighted to show how new studies focus on the cultural reproduction of dominant narratives in addition to top-down political discourse.

A Forward Look

Introduction to the Special Issue "An agenda for science and technology policy studies? Emerging themes from the work of young scholars"

Anti–Anticorruption

The article puts the work of Barry Hindess in the context of other strands of research on corruption and anticorruption. This work can be found in a chapter of a book on Antipolitics, in a report he wrote for his Department’s “Democratic Audit” of Australia, and in an article in Third World Quarterly. It has also been part of his doctoral supervision and teaching and his encouragement of the work of younger scholars. Running through his engagement with the history of the idea of corruption, and with definitions and deployments of the idea of corruption by the anticorruption nongovernmental organization (NGO) Transparency International (TI), were arguments with modern forms of liberalism and democracy as they operate internationally and in Australia.

Standing at the Crossroads: The Battle for the Heart and Soul of Pentecostalism

Abstract This address, delivered at the 40th annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies in Memphis, Tennessee (March 12, 2011), examines the present state of Pentecostalism and Pentecostal studies through an analogy with American indigenous blues music. Seeing Pentecostalism at a significant juncture, the address seeks to call Pentecostals and Pentecostal scholars to a consideration of what is essential to Pentecostal scholarship. Proposed is a conversational model of scholarship characterized by: 1) an openness to what the Spirit is saying and/or doing in other theologies or movements; 2) commitment to a Pentecostal way of doing theology in the Spirit; 3) interdisciplinary approaches; 4) a commitment to narrative and experience over dogma and proposition; and 5) an openness to hearing the visionary work of young scholars.

Editor's Column: Continuing Traditions and New Beginnings

It is with great pleasure that I assume the editorial responsibilities of The Comparatist, the official organ of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. I assume the tasks of editor also with a great sense of dedication. This journal is one of a handful of publications devoted to Comparative Literature in the United States. It has a fine tradition of mentoring the work of young scholars in our field. This commitment is highlighted by the yearly publication of the best graduate student paper from the preceding year's SCLA conference. Under the able hands of its past editors, The Comparatist has done much to foster the work of scholars in the initial stages of their careers. I have a personal fondness for this journal since it was here, under the able editorship of John Burt Foster, Jr. that I published my own first articles. Although I then lived and worked in the North, I knew that the SCLA and The Comparatist were the places to go if one needed mentoring and feedback on one's fledgling steps in the profession. It was my experience with the SCLA and The Comparatist that has so endeared me to this organization and this journal. I hope to continue this editorial dedication to helping and mentoring young scholars during my tenure as editor. The Comparatist, however, is also a journal that senior scholars hold in esteem and seek as a congenial site for their work. I am committed to upholding the custom of publishing senior contributions alongside the work of junior colleagues. With the encouragement of the Board of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, I plan in the coming issues to dedicate space in each volume to innovative clusters of articles. These clusters will in no way replace the open submission content of the journal which has, I am happy to say, increased exponentially in recent years. These cluster groupings will take various forms. In this issue, for example, I have included a forum sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association last year at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Puebla, Mexico (April 19-24, 2007) where a number of representative scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia gathered to discuss the field of Comparative Literature in their respective countries. Although our discipline is presumably global in scope, we can be as provincial as any national language and literature group. It was for this reason that I organized this forum at the American national association's meeting with the goal of facilitating discussion concerning what was happening in our discipline internationally. I introduced the forum in my then capacity as President pro tempore of the International Comparative Literature Association. Taking off my sober top-hat of Editor and putting on the more comfortable cloche of cynic and polemicist, I reproduce this introduction here to present this collection. Eugene Eoyang offers his thoughts on the state of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong. Hans Bertens discusses how recent developments in European university reform have impacted on the discipline in The Netherlands. Ross Shideler discusses the health of the field, as it is currently configured in the United States and Steven Sondrup outlines the role the international association plays in the discipline. Chon Young-Ae gives a brief analysis of the past and future of Comparative Literature in Korea. Inaga Shigemi offers a history of Japanese encounters with the West as a point of departure for his discussion of how Comparative Literature might develop in the future. An expanded version of Professor Inaga's comments in Puebla is presented in these pages and they provide an ideal bridge to the next grouping of articles appearing in this issue. …

<i>Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953</i> (review)

Book Reviews195 nature of status, mobility, and land tenure in traditional Korea, social historians may be skeptical of anthropological analyses based on some necessarily tentative assumptions. One would hope that they might yet be as attentive to theJanellis' work as theJanellis were to social history, perhaps with similarly intriguing results. Laurel Kendall American Museum ofNatural History Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953. Edited by Bruce Cumings. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983, 335 pp. A rapid reassessment of the foreign policy of the Truman administration is being furthered through the opening of additional American and British archives. The greatest challenge faced by Truman and his colleagues lay in the protracted struggle in Korea between 1950 and 1953. Truman showed decisiveness in handling key issues: notably, the commitment of American resources to oppose North Korea in late June 1950; the crossing of the thirty-eighth parallel and the curious encounter with General MacArthur at Wake Island in October 1950; the determination to survive the days of despair in December 1950January 1951; the dismissal of MacArthur in April 1951; and the resolute refusal to return prisoners of war to North Korea or China contrary to their wishes. However, Truman was only one and not necessarily the most important of those concerned with the formulation ofAmerican policy. Many aspects ofthe Korean conflict have been controversial or obscure. Why was American policy towards the Korean peninsula erratic and at times contradictory between 1945 and 1950? How interested in Korea were the various parts of the bureaucracy in Washington? What were the intentions of the governing elites in Seoul and P'yongyang? Who provoked whom, or were both sides responsible ? What was the relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union? Did Stalin encourage Kim Ilsong in an adventurist policy or not? Where did Peking figures in events before large-scale Chinese intervention? To what extent were Taiwan and Korea linked before Truman's formal statement at the start of the war? Why did it take so long to end the conflict and was this due to malevolence or incompetence ? These questions and many others are examined in this important new volume of essays edited by Bruce Cumings. It is in some 196Book Reviews respects complementary to the valuable work edited by Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs, Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations , 1947-1950 (New York, 1980). Cumings and his associates cover a longer period but address themselves to some analogous problems . Most of the contributors have relied principally on a wide range of American sources, including the extensive holdings of the National Archives, the numerous papers in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries, and other relevant collections, such as the Dulles and MacArthur archives. Some Korean material has been used but a great deal remains to be utilized, including the voluminous North Korean records seized by the Americans in October 1950. The most difficult areas concern the policies of the Soviet Union and China; as the editor remarks, it will be a long time before these are fully clarified (if ever). Each contributor writes with force and distinction and the volume assumes a more cohesive character than is usual in such collections. The volume is the result of two conferences held in Seattle in 1978 and 1980 and essentially represents the work ofyoung scholars, who have labored in depth over the past decade to ascertain why the Korean war occurred and why it took the form it did. Bruce Cumings provides a succinct preface and then a lengthy, most stimulating introduction that sets the revisionist tone. He asserts that traditional interpretations of the outbreak of the con flict are erroneous because they depict the administration reacting to events and implementing a strategy of containment. Cumings maintains that in reality Truman and his colleagues were more adventurous and attempted a rollback policy in which communism would be driven into retreat through, in this case, the unification of the Korean peninsula under United Nations auspices. This development is placed in the framework of the coalition within the American establishment advocating the consolidation of the Truman doctrine through dynamic American world leadership: in party terms this connoted most of the Democrats and the liberal Republicans...

Introduction

In the last few years Canadians have begun to rediscover their educational past. For the most part the movement to revitalize the history of Canadian education has been the work of younger scholars, and the results of their thought, energy, and research are just now reaching the point of visibility. The purpose of this collection is to make some of that work public.

China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913

"Great themes run through this book: local differentiation and societal integration, reform and revolution, innovation and renewal, conservatism and radicalism, tradition and modernity. All relate to the fascinating dialectic of Chinese history." This comment by G. William Skinner aptly describes this pioneering volume in which twelve specialists in Chinese history discuss the great questions of history in the dramatic context of the "New China" of the early twentieth century. The work of young scholars from seven countries who have had access to Chinese, British, and French archives opened only in recent years, the book provides new findings that presage not only a reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1911 itself but also of the dynamic links between Imperial China and both the communist revolution of 1927-49 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of today. "An outstanding example of historians' inquiries is this collection of essays by 12 authorities, brilliantly edited by Mary Wright of Yale. Brilliant because unlike most such cooperative endeavors, the studies in this volume focus on a single major topic, China in the years around the revolution of 1911. The papers vary in scope, from a general interpretation of the origins of the warlord armies, which were to dominate Chinese political life until the mid-twenties, to a fascinating reconstruction of events hour-by-hour during the first week of the revolution in the city where it began, Wuchang...This important work is bound to have a great impact on our understanding of modern China, and will surely stimulate further research in the period."-New York Times Book Review "Will set a style for ten to twenty years hence by all scholars of the subject."-John K. Fairbank.